1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic mail sending/receiving apparatus for sending and receiving electronic mail including either one of a text and an image, a method, and a recording medium recording a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been conventionally known a mobile terminal that determines, for electronic mails received from the same sender, whether mail reception notification is to be performed, based on the reception interval between these mails, and appropriately switches between performing notification and not performing notification (for example, refer to JP 2008-97218 A). In this mobile terminal, when electronic mails are frequently sent and received, even if the electric mail reception notification is not performed, the holder of the mobile terminal can easily recognize the electronic mail reception. Specifically, the mobile terminal is configured not to perform the reception notification of the electronic mail if an electronic mail is received/sent within a predetermined time.
Recently, the number of registrants of an instant messenger service called LINE® has been increasing. By using LINE, a LINE mail including text or an image is exchanged between mobile terminals with a simple operation. In this LINE mail system, a text message including text and an image such as an illustration called “stamp” are separately exchanged. Accordingly, when text and a stamp related to the content of the text are sent, a LINE mail including the text is first sent, and a LINE mail including the stamp is subsequently sent.
When two LINE mails are successively sent in this manner, whether to perform notification at the time of the LINE mail reception is determined using the technique disclosed in JP 2008-97218 A mentioned above, and notification is not performed when the second LINE mail is received. Thus, the recipient of the mail may fail to recognize the reception of the stamp. In contrast, if the mobile terminal is configured to perform notification every time a LINE mail is received, without using the technique disclosed in JP 2008-97218 A, such recognition failure may not occur. This, however, causes the following problem. Notification is performed every time each of a plurality of LINE mails associated with each other is received, which involves the cumbersome operation of checking the content of the received LINE mail every time notification is performed. When a plurality of LINE mails is received using a vehicle-mounted apparatus, even if reception notification of these LINE mails is performed at a short time interval, it is not easy to separately check the contents of the respective LINE mails every time notification is performed. In particular, if a plurality of LINE mails respectively including text and an image associated with the text is consecutively received in a short time interval, it is considered to be sufficient that the contents of the respective LINE mails are checked at the time when this series of LINE mails is received. Nevertheless, the conventional techniques including the above-mentioned technique of JP 2008-97218 A cannot deal with such a content checking method.